I upgraded my work pc from BOINC V6 to V7 last week. Everything seemed fine but on Friday I had to RDP in. Fairly late Saturday night I had to RDP in again
and I noticed the GPU hadn't been re-enabled at the end of the previous session.

I thought I'd done something stupid so I exited BOINC and restarted it. About an hour later I closed down the RDP session. The GPU didn't become usable until I arrived at work this morning and logged in.

I never had this issue with BOIC V6. Is there a V7 configuration option I've missed?

I have to use RDP for work. I haven't found anything else that works in the same way and so seamlessly.

Here is an extract of the log showing the Saturday start up and the next time the word GPU showed in the log, which was this morning.

When you use RDP, Microsoft uses a non-CUDA/OpenCL driver. BOINC is designed to detect this and suspend GPU usage because of it.

Here's the catch .22:

When you use RDP, as I said, it uses its own video driver. If you simply close the RDP session (you don't use the Start -> log off option), the RDP session remains running, and thus so does the RDP video driver.

However, if you do use the Start -> Log off option, you are exiting the user session in Windows, and the more advanced video driver is loaded under the user context (the video driver was removed as part of the kernel starting with Windows Vista to reduce the number of catastrophic crashes locking up the system). This means BOINC won't be able to use the video driver until someone logs back into the physical console.

My only suggested alternative (and what I do on my own personal network) is to use BOINC's built in remote control feature. You can read how to setup this feature up on the BOINC FAQ Service. Note that if you're doing this through a firewall/router, you'll need to allow port 31416.

Thanks. I didn't have to do that in BOINC V6, it just recognised that RDP was no longer being run.

When you say use Start -> log off, is this an RDP option or do you mean logoff from my remote PC. If the latter, then I don't think this is suitable as BOINC runs under my account and it would stop running.

I doubt if I'd be able to allow a new port at work.

If I can't solve this, would it be relatively easy to reinstall BOINC V6, or would I have to totally clear the current installation and therefore my work PC would become a new PC?

I only went to BOINC V7 because I understood that S@H V7 now had stock ATI capability and I was hoping to get some of those for GUI processing. But as I've never received any I guess they don't exist or my GUI set up is not good enough.

I only went to BOINC V7 because I understood that S@H V7 now had stock ATI capability and I was hoping to get some of those for GUI processing. But as I've never received any I guess they don't exist or my GUI set up is not good enough.

It's not GUI (graphical user interface) processing but GPU (graphics processing unit) processing (more precisely GPGPU, General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit). But when the RDP session is using its own video driver, the GPU processing in BOINC is essentially disabled. Therefore you don't see much work being processed on it. Jord

Ancient Astronaut Theorists can tell you that I do not help with tech questions via private message. Please use the forums for that.

However, apart from the last few days, the GPU has been available. There were no AP tasks available for a lot of that time, but I was hoping to get some S@H V7 stock ATI tasks. As I didn't, I assumed that either they don't exist or my set up is not correct.

It's not really important. I'm just trying to get back to BOINC being a run and forget application. I guess I'll to revert to BOINC V6 at some time.

Thanks. I didn't have to do that in BOINC V6, it just recognised that RDP was no longer being run.

To my knowledge, this should have always been true because it is an RDP thing, not a BOINC thing.

When you say use Start -> log off, is this an RDP option or do you mean logoff from my remote PC. If the latter, then I don't think this is suitable as BOINC runs under my account and it would stop running.

Yes, I mean using the Start -> Log off option on the client, and yes, that is the catch .22 I alluded to. If you log off the client, BOINC will not be running.

I doubt if I'd be able to allow a new port at work.

Then that option would not work for you.

If I can't solve this, would it be relatively easy to reinstall BOINC V6, or would I have to totally clear the current installation and therefore my work PC would become a new PC?

Because of some fairly major changes to BOINC v7, I would say if your remove it, make sure to remove all folders left behind (BOINC's installer and uninstaller are non-destructive and leave behind files in \Program Files\BOINC and \ProgramData\BOINC). Then you can safely re-install BOINC v6.x.

I only went to BOINC V7 because I understood that S@H V7 now had stock ATI capability and I was hoping to get some of those for GUI processing. But as I've never received any I guess they don't exist or my GUI set up is not good enough.

BOINC v6 has support for ATi GPUs too. This is unrelated to SETI@home's ATi app; BOINC v7 is not a requirement to run S@H v7.

If you're not receiving ATi GPU work, I would check to make sure your driver is supported and up-to-date, and use the ones from ATI/AMD instead of the disc your received with your card. The AMD/ATI drivers will include the OpenCL component needed for crunching.

BTW, when I spotted that there was a stock AP ATI application late last year, I downloaded the latest driver and have been running these GPU apps since then.

When S@H V7 came out I expected to start getting GPU apps for that, but didn't. So I thought that maybe BOINC V6 didn't give enough information to show it could run those apps and that's why I upgraded to BOINC V7.

Unfortunately I can't remember where I read that S@H V7 had a stock ATI app and I can't find any details of it's minimum requirements, so maybe I do need to update the driver or maybe the OpenCL version, or, perhaps my GPU, HD 6570, is not good enough.

I don't know if you can help on this. From the log extract I gave when I started this thread this is what I've got.

It seems you already had stated some things related to the questions I had. I'm going to have to think about this a bit.

The basic problem is BOINC is detecting a condition (RDP is in use but disconnected) which does not appear to be a problem for you, but causes science applications to crash on home computers when they use Fast User Switching.

Fast User Switching/Remote Desktop are different names for the same technology.----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. BerkeleyMy Blog

I see. That would be a problem. Is this a remote thing or just the switch user option? Can you not tell the difference between a switch user and a remote connection or are they exactly the same thing? If they're not the same thing, can you tell when the original user switches back?

I wonder what happens in BOINC V6 if another user RDPs to my work PC.

If I remember, I'll give it a test next time I'm physically in the office. Of course only one user at a time can RDP to a PC. If another user tries, the first user is thrown out. At least that's how it worked a few years ago. So all BOINC V6 has to do is recognise the disconnection, connection in the right order to still work properly. Or does it go to sleep and can't catch those steps. Hmm! I can see the problems.

This might be a bit simplistic, but it seems to me that if BOINC 7 recognises an RDP connection, it would work correctly if it remembered the state of the GPU at the connection time and resets it when the connection is broken.

So if the GPU was disabled it would remain disabled but if it was enabled it would be re-enabled.

I see. That would be a problem. Is this a remote thing or just the switch user option? Can you not tell the difference between a switch user and a remote connection or are they exactly the same thing? If they're not the same thing, can you tell when the original user switches back?

I wonder what happens in BOINC V6 if another user RDPs to my work PC.

If I remember, I'll give it a test next time I'm physically in the office. Of course only one user at a time can RDP to a PC. If another user tries, the first user is thrown out. At least that's how it worked a few years ago. So all BOINC V6 has to do is recognise the disconnection, connection in the right order to still work properly. Or does it go to sleep and can't catch those steps. Hmm! I can see the problems.

Rick

According to the APIs I've found so far a switch user and remote connection are the same thing. I haven't found a way to discern the two conditions programmatically yet.----- Rom
BOINC Development Team, U.C. BerkeleyMy Blog

This might be a bit simplistic, but it seems to me that if BOINC 7 recognises an RDP connection, it would work correctly if it remembered the state of the GPU at the connection time and resets it when the connection is broken.

So if the GPU was disabled it would remain disabled but if it was enabled it would be re-enabled.

Well, if I remember the situation correctly. Before BOINC learned about how to deal with remote connections jobs were just randomly failing.

It turns how the identifier a science app uses to communicate with the GPU is invalidated once an RDP connection is established. The app would usually crash at the end of its run. That is why we opted to just shutdown GPU apps when a remote session was established, there was no point continuing to run an app that eventually was going to crash and invalidate the work accomplished so far.

I'm actually quite surprised that you have a configuration that continues to work after an RDP connection has been established and released.